"Knight's move thinking" is a psychiatric term describing a thought disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer jumping from one idea to another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia. To anyone who cares to observe this is also a phenomenon pretty common among people without any psychiatric diagnosis. If you analyse the chain of steps between topics in most casual conversations, there seems to be little logical progression. Casual, drunken or drugged talk relies on very subjective and tenuous jumps from one subject to another. Intellectually rigorous or disciplined dialogues where a central theme is examined by conversants from different angles and no sidetracking occurs isn't always the rule. Maybe schizophrenics do it more, but I think we all do it.
To examine it in more detail there is an implication that there is a kind of logic at work but that knight's move thinking is more a case of eliding three steps of a more linear logic into one leap that is harder for the listening party to follow. I would ask whether a thinker who used this lateral leaping method could in fact emulate a linear step by step argument by clever moves, rather as a knight's tour around a chessboard reaches every square eventually.
Works by writers like James Joyce or William Faulkner may also have an element of this style of idea linkage. Punning and misspelling as a connection between ideas in a conversational flow is very connected to the idea also. Clang association is also based on this idea of a kind of semantic perversity in how one communicates.
I leave you with a poem written by a sufferer of schizophrenia (me actually), which demonstrates a dense serious of lateral associations between terms. Was I suffering from thought disorder when i wrote it ? I am not sure, though there may well also be an ironic simulation of the symptom by self aware sufferers who are not in relapse.
Wandering in his raincoat I saw Deleuze
he asked me what i thought the essence of being Schizy was.
I replied that such charming problems were no longer mine
since i had graduated to the status of a sane adept
and my outlook was now metamorphosed
I became a beetle and read all of Kafka
I ate dirt and studied Artaud
drank absinthe and recited Rimbaud
imagined being a Dork and read The Selfish Gene
i took a token from Bilbo and Frodo
liked Fish's lyrics and similar themes
The restaurant at the end of the multiverse
meetings with Elric or Cornelius
hawks flutter in the wind
Lemmy see...Lemmy see
Cryptozoic held my attention for a while
Switched on the radio head
I've a creeping suspicion that my computer will be ok
after all. I am and You are
OK I give up.
what would it feel like to implode
like one of Hawking's holes ?
i studied my own Brief History
and danced with the devil in the pale moonlight
Batman returned to Michelle's magical mystery journey
the magic bus asked me :" what is your movie?"
it moves me like no other lover
since all you require is love
McCartney and Lenin formed a dictatorship of muzak
Brian Eno made music for spaceports
Jefferson Zeppelin sank like a lead balloon
in Withnail and I Danny summarised the essence
speed is like a hundred transformations
after all.... E's are good E's are good
Scrooge has a drug problem
Scrooge Macmurphy meets the cuckoos of Midwich
(middleclass life left behind)
Jack's elegy for Charlie
gave birth to a fountain pen of the same name
I'm the real Slim Shady. hazy days of sunshine
come to the sunshine state
Charlie and Hanson
Rhymes with Manson. My fathers house has many mansions
Terry, Carolyn's friend is the dirty evangelical
angels at my table - some ozzie bird
mensa mensa mensam as Bob chants for his Latin
Latin lovers link hands
hand me the duchie on the left hand side
Sonic or Musical
this sabbath day Joseph and his superstar dirty raincoat got paranoid
his Silver Machine had Wheels of Steel
it went like a Bat out of Hell
Janis went down on me to the valley below
had one more cup of coffee and met Isis
Helena promptly unveiled her
after a meeting with a remarkable ubermensch
Friedrich painted an S on his chest for Lois
Luther Vandross nailed Martin's demands on the church door
and i scrubbed my back in the bath with a loofah
Barry White communicated with elephants using subsonics
Eternal reverberation spreads into Hod, Yesod and Malkhut
Obi Wan Kenobi taught Luke and Matt to sing
D'ye ken Graham's Ratty and Toad
Alice in the Wunderkind
Morrissey elided the vowels like an arab
Robert got caught killing one
the outsider turned a somersault,
and downloaded tracks from fresh Limewire soda.
Sodom and Gomorrah sang Big Audio TNT
Clash of the Titans
2001 a saturnine odyssey
homeric and meritocratic
hypocritical and mission critical
Mission to Mars meets an impossible Nimoy
Kirk means church in scottish
shortbread and the daily bread of faith
Faith no More my friends i have joined the Agnostic Front
or am practising inner gnosis on Jacob's Ladder
or cream crackers, or crackers and hackers
or War Games with weapons of Weird Science
let's get Physicsey by system of a down
Down by Law a film by Jim Jarmusch
Alex Cox loved it !
Repoman repossessed the exorcised shining ones
Clockwork cuckoos in Midwich
Triffids with their heat rays over horsell common
or a silver fly like ultraviolent cover versions
I stumble through this landscape of allusion
with Illusions I am Jonathan Livingston or Stanley I presume